“Hell and heaven, and all realities in-between, are states of consciousness. No one can send you to hell. You have to make your way there on your own,” he tried to explain.
“Can I go to hell?”
This time he laughed outright. It wasn’t her ignorance that he found disarming. It was her innocence against the background of her past. It seemed that the truly innocent are protected no matter where they find themselves. They say that you cannot cheat an honest man. Well, he thought, you cannot really corrupt an innocent child. As for ‘going’ to hell, corruption is a self-employed and self-fueled malignancy. You can even catch it, like a virus; but if your heart is pure, the disease will not take hold. No matter how hard some people try to pollute you. And there are many that do.
As for Deborah’s innocence, Sacha’s definition of the term was not of the usual usage. He thought of innocence as a state of consciousness, which, in Biblical terms, Adam and Eve lost after eating of the Tree of Knowledge. To Sacha this event defines the moment in the development of human psyche, when we began to differentiate between good and evil. When the Edenic singularity was split into a dualistic reality. This was the true, the real loss of innocence. We now recognize our moral discernment as a positive attribute, as, for the purposes of accelerated learning, they indeed are. Sacha wondered how many of us regard the concept of duality in this light?
Hence Deborah’s innocence.
To choose––one must have a choice. In Deborah’s life there was little or no choice. As a result, her life was virtually devoid of compromise. She did what she believed was right regardless of the price she might have to pay. In fact such a payment did not figure in the equation. She conducted herself according to a code of honesty that was head and shoulders above those who would look down at her from their sacerdotal heights. Deborah could not understand the concept of sin.
When Sacha got up from a short rest following one of his nightly forays, Alicia gave the young couple time to enjoy each other, before spending any time with them. And even then, she took pleasure in just sitting there, on the side, listening to their discussions, watching them over the top of her half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose. An open book would rest on her knees, but no page would turn for as long as the youngsters talked on any subject. Only sometimes would she butt in and then mostly when asked.
“What would you have done, Grandma?”
The question concerned a man who insisted that Sacha follow him to his house and heal his dog. He spoke through an open window of his car. Obviously he expected Sacha to drive behind him. The dog, he said, was fourteen years old and had a good year or two in him yet. The man saw Sacha’s picture in a newspaper and the story beside it claimed that Sacha had the power to heal animals. It was rather an amazing story, because in all his life he’d only healed one animal, and that was in India. No one here could have known about that.
It turned out later that the story said that he helped the downtrodden, whom others treated ‘worse than dogs’.
“How far was the house?” Alicia asked, in her practical manner.
“The other side of town,” Sacha replied.
In truth he had no idea where the house was, but had it been close, he would have probably tried to help. Even if it was against his better judgment. Of course, Sacha didn’t have a car, either.
“Then I would tell the man that we all have a term on this Earth, including dogs, and it was not up to us to decide who should live or die.”
Sacha loved his grandmother more with each day. This was roughly what he had told the man. What he’d also done was to quiet the man’s anxiety by showing him that his dog didn’t suffer. That dogs like man go to a better place when they vacate their bodies. This wasn’t quite accurate but it served to give the man peace he obviously sought.
Deborah looked up at Sacha. She always looked up to him. Not just at him. Sitting or standing, he was a foot taller than she was.
“You are a very wise woman, Grandma, if I may say so.” Sacha smiled his appreciation.
He felt better knowing that when his time came, Deborah could draw on Alicia’s innate wisdom. It wasn’t just a question of knowledge. Sacha thought of wisdom as that strange blend of knowledge and love. One tempers the other, and only then it shines with the truth.
Deborah was buoyant. She clapped her hands as though applauding Alicia’s answer.
“I knew it! I knew it! That’s what I would have said.” And then her radiant face got serious. “Only I have no idea why...” she confessed.
In a way, Deborah shared Sacha’s propensity for truth. It was not acquired from books, although Sacha probably read more books than anyone alive. It was an inherent feeling, rather than knowledge. A characteristic that many women share. Many, though a lot fewer than claim to possess this gift. Alicia may have been born with innate knowledge, but at her age it would be hard to distinguish between inborn and acquired wisdom. That she possessed it, was self-evident. The rest was of no importance.
“So what happens to us when we die?” Deborah was in her questioning mood. She was buzzing from subject to subject like a bee or a wasp as her name implied in the original Hebrew.
“What do you think happens?”
“Nothing much,” she asked, nodding her head.
“That’s pretty much the truth,” Sacha agreed. “Whatever you were here, in this body, you pretty much continue in the other realms.”
“Other realms...?” This time she looked up and held his eyes. She did that whenever she deemed something important.
Sacha glanced at Alicia. She knew. He could speak openly.
“You recall Montreal? That was one realm. This, right here, is another. How do you find they differ?”
She was taken aback. How do they differ? Was he mad?
He read her thoughts. He couldn’t help it. When Deborah got exited her emotions were screaming aloud. He couldn’t possibly miss them. Actually the only people he had problems reading, like that man in prison, were those who either had no emotions to speak of, or had them under great control. Thoughts and emotions were not the same thing, but emotions were like fuel to thoughts. They ignited them and kept them coming.
“I see you think I’m mad. But let me ask this question in another way. How have you changed in the context of those two realities?”
“Why... have I changed?” This time she looked at Alicia. “Well, have I?”
“You don’t detect much difference, do you. That’s how it should be. The point I am making is that in two realities as different as Montreal and Los Angeles, you are the constant. The realities change, you remain basically the same.”
“And that’s what happens when we die?”
He nodded.
“But that means that we don’t die at all. We just change...”
“...we just change our point of view. Our perception of reality changes, and that empowers us to do things which we would find difficult here.”
Alicia moved closer. She’d listened with the same intensity, as did Deborah. When one is soon to become an octogenarian, such subjects are of some interest to one.
“We keep our bodies too?” Alicia asked with a degree of distaste.
“No, Grandma. We can design our own bodies. Don’t forget that for many years, down here, we all designed our bodies. We have a storehouse of genes and we manipulate them into a shape and form we desire. We can increase our strength, we can eat well, not abuse our bodies with smoke and booze, and we can look as good at your age as you do.”
“Don’t be cheeky, young man. Thank you all the same.” But she didn’t buy it. Not all of it. It was a little too good to be true. Sacha looked keenly at his grandmother and asked very quietly: “Do you remember the dream you had the day Desmond died?”
And the next moment Alicia’s face lit up like a thousand suns.
“It... it’s... It is true then...”
She didn’t ask how Sacha knew what she’d dreamt. It was the dream she wouldn’t forge
t for as long as she lived. She didn’t ask how Sacha knew all sorts of things, but had long decided never to question his words.
Sacha wondered how come Alicia had never asked about his grandfather. Her first husband. But he wasn’t around when Grandpa died. She wouldn’t have known how to ask him then. Or now, for that matter. Or maybe his life force was held in abeyance, during his last stages in Bardo. Anyway, subjective truth becomes more obscure with time. It even changes, depending on our perception of reality. And that changes also. Memories are so arranged as to protect the present. The only ‘time’ when you are really alive. Today may be an arbitrary construct of your awareness but the past is just an illusion. No two people would describe the same event of five years ago in the same way. They might agree on fundamentals, but not the details. Memory protects us from living in a mirage.
And this is what would ultimately save Deborah.
The past, no matter how true, would become hazy under the veil of time. In a few years, she would reject the notion that such a reality, as she’d experienced in Montreal, really existed. It would be at odds with the present. People who dwell on the past are seldom happy. Even if they attempt to dwell on pleasant memories. It is unnatural. Against our true nature. And our true nature, like truth itself, has its being only in the present.
When he talked to Deborah of these and other things, he arranged his thoughts in a pattern that would be easier for her to absorb. And Alicia would help, if necessary. His own time was drawing to an end. This was his last holiday during which he worked nights only. Soon he would bare his soul to the world. He would be admired by some, reviled by others. Such is the nature of dualistic reality. We all serve to restore the balance.
But he felt sorry for those who would choose to be on the wrong side. Whichever side that was. He was not here to judge. He was here to share, to set free.
As so many others before him.
Deborah’s head was resting on his shoulder. She sighed as he moved her gently, placed a pillow under her head and covered her feet with a light blanket. He then walked up to Alicia and kissed her cheek. She held his head in both palms for a little while, as though to draw him towards her.
“Thank you, my boy,” was all she said.
And Sacha walked to the door, on tiptoe, and let himself out. There was a man standing on the other side of the street. As Sacha moved to the left, the man followed his footsteps. A minute later the man had lost him.
Sacha dissolved into the night.
Chapter 21
A Stranger in a Strange Land
There was a book by this title. “Stranger in a Strange Land.” By Heilein. Robert Heilein. The hero of the novel was a Martian. Born on Mars but of Earthly origin. Sacha was not born on Earth either. His body was. Sacha was not born at all. You might call his birth the moment when he became fully aware of his own individuality, but that was further back than one could remember. That anyone could remember.
Sacha suspected that the Undiscovered Realm was truly infinite. When you cannot be defined in terms of either time or space, you are infinite. Like the present. The Eternal Now. While the physical, emotional and mental worlds have temporal limits, the Undiscovered Realm is forever.
Of course no one knew for sure.
If you knew that would mean you’ve reached the end. The border. No one ever has. Sacha suspected that no one ever would. Or even tried. Neither in spatial nor in temporal sense. There was neither time nor space in which one could travel. The Undiscovered Realm, his Real Home, was a state of consciousness.
Sacha heard, he knew not whence, that some ancients had suspected that at a certain level of perception, the globes of light, which had their being in that reality, all merged, periodically, into a single Conscious Entity. They became One. For countless eon they remained indivisible, and––at the end of time––they became individualized. There is a subtle difference. If such a proposition is true, and there is no way of proving it, then even in the Undiscovered Realm there is a form of becoming. True, the principal becoming is taking place through the perceptions generated or experienced at lower realities, but the consequences of such, the end results, did or would influence the Undiscovered Realm itself. It has been said, among those ancients, that the diversity of expression of the Whole was, periodically, turned inward. Even as each individualization periodically returned to Bardo to dream of new realities, so did all individualizations return to the Whole. It absorbed Itself into Itself. Perhaps there, the Whole also dreamt of new universes, new forms of expression.
Yet as far as Sacha could gather, in the Highest Realm, there is no periodicity. No cyclic succession. In a way, all the components already are One. Only there, wherever ‘there’ is, within the ultimate Unity, he suspected that there is no more differentiation. At the outer limits of the Far Country one lost the remnants of one’s personality. One left it behind. In the Undiscovered Realm only individuality continued and only so as to assert its integrity with the Source that permeated each aspect of Its own expression. Sacha never lost the feeling that his true self was alien to the physical existence. He was a stranger here––on Earth. It was a reality that he could enhance enormously with his perceptions, with his state of mind, but in most respects it was inconsequential, transient, almost sad. He had to continue reminding himself where he was, and why he was here. And yet, in direct contradiction, he had to fulfill his mission in order to free himself from his own personality. From that which kept him apart.
In order to return to his true home.
Permanently? Only the Whole is permanent. Even if, as the ancients predicted, oscillating. As the day and the night of Brahma. All else is transient.
I am a stranger in a strange land, he told himself.
It was time for action. The nights grew longer; the days shed their light earlier in the evening. Winter was coming. Would it prove to be a winter of his discontent? Or a winter of success and ebullient glory?
A winter of fulfillment...
A letter from Bonae Voluntatis, care of McGill University, had been redirected to LA. There was some extra postage to pay. No matter. It said what Sacha wanted them to say. There were words of gratitude for his generous donation. It said that his membership was approved (card enclosed) and, would he be available to represent the work of Bonae Voluntatis in his area? In the southwestern United States? After he finished at McGill, of course. Or was he traveling often enough to initiate some organizational notions even now? They needed his help badly. There was so much to do. Etc., etc., etc..
They were right about the amount of work, though not quite of the genre they’d suggested. Within three days of receiving the Bonae Voluntatis membership, his offer to speak at two universities, three charitable organizations and two churches had also been accepted, approved and the dates fixed.
Why am I doing this?
It was time for action.
He requested and was given air time on TV. The local stations contacted their national counterparts and he was about to address the nation. Some of the nation. It was an Educational channel. PBS TV. Nevertheless, after the very first broadcast his fate has been sealed. His fame was beginning to follow him wherever he went. He had to employ all the tricks, yes tricks he’d learned from the Far Eastern gurus, to dodge the many begging him for help, advice, financial assistance, healing, even absolution. When he agreed to give a talk in the local Anglican Church, ten thousand people arrived. Loudspeakers have been installed outside; the streets had been blocked for hours. Other churches followed.
What am I doing here?
SACHA 25+ 168 days
Desire, on Earth, is regarded as a yen, as a means of satisfying an inner or outer hunger or longing. Buddha said that desire is at the root of all suffering. Not so in the higher or inner realms. Once I shed my physical body, desire is the expression of my creative will. I create to enhance the universe I perceive with my higher senses. There is no yen or wanting. My creation is as detached from me as I am, from the fruit of my
desire. I don’t own it. I enjoy it and offer to share it with my successors. When I depart, I might long for the state of mind—never for the fruit of my creation. Or is this what Buddha has been talking about? The state of mind?
Christmas came early this year. Not that the date had changed, but people began celebrating the Nativity a month before Sacha had arrived in Los Angeles. By mid December, the street decorations looked tattered, their fragments floating on the streets, swept by the winter winds carried by El Niño.
El Niño. More people swore at the name than rejoiced in it. It brought unaccustomed storms, challenging the dry, hot Santa Anna blowing in the opposite direction. El Niño mounted and drove the waves of the mighty Pacific until they reached far inland, until the Christmas decorations had been torn from trees, from lampposts, from people’s front porches. The seacoast was no longer a desirable destination for the holiday-makers. They preferred to stay way inland, celebrating their Christmas on the golf courses, just to be sure.
And this year, El Niño blew with singular and spectacular premeditation. Like never before. El Niño, the Child born at Christmas. The Child hated by many.
Sacha—The Way Back Page 27
